Siegfried Sassoon has been up and down of late, but he is essentially a man in limbo. He may write pastoral reveries or character studies of the men he commands or a prose ode to a new Canadian officer he admires, or he may gloomily foretell death and destruction–but whatever he does he can’t escape the waiting. This has come to seem like a very long (re-) approach of the line indeed, but it was only a little over three weeks ago that he arrived back in the old battle-zone…
June 5 9.30 p.m.
Yesterday was the first bad day I’ve had for three weeks at least; and I finished the day with nerves racked and life hideous. But this morning I got up, with great difficulty, at 6.30, and started off with the men at 7.45 for a Brigade field-day. A hot day and not too strenuous. We only went a mile from here and finished two miles from home. Did an attack from. 10.30 till 2.30. I became a ‘casualty’ as soon as they got fairly started on their 2000-yard assault. And I lay among the rustling barley and listened to the larks and soaked in the sunshine, the rumour of death was very far away—a low rumble of guns. So I am in good spirits again to-night, and the furies have sailed away into the blue air.
One of the other characteristics of Sassoon’s recent diaries is that they are beginning to be more open about his attraction to men. It’s safe to say that Sassoon, whatever he might write about or suppress, would steer clear of actual romantic or sexual involvements with men under his command. This is not (just) because active homosexuality is dangerous–it is not only illegal, persecuted, and sometimes prosecuted, but also a current right-wing cause célèbre–but because such a relationship would be catastrophic to military discipline and morale, which are far more important to Sassoon, right now, than his own happiness.
But he can still admire attractive men, and recognize the ways in which his own desires inform his role as a shepherd to a platoon of young victims:
When I rode into the transport lines this afternoon I saw Jim Linthwaite toiling at cleaning a limber, under the supervision of a military policeman. (He has still ten days to do of his twenty-eight Field Punishment No 2 for getting drunk at-Marseilles.) But I gave him a cheery word and a grin, and he smiled at me, standing there in his grimy slacks and blue jersey. I wonder if he thought it a strange thing to do? I hadn’t spoken to him since I talked to him like a father when he was awaiting his court-martial. Something drew me to him when I saw him first. ‘Linthwaite, a nice name’ I thought, when they told me he was a First Battalion man. Then I saw him, digging away at road-mending, and he’d got a rotten pair of boots, which were an excuse for conversation; and I’ve loved him ever since (it is just as well he’s not in my present Company). And when he got into trouble I longed to be kind to him. And, I talked to him about ‘making a fresh start, and not doing anything silly again’, while he.stood in front of me with his white face, and eyes full of tears. I suppose I’d have done the same for any man in the Company who had a good character. But there was a great deal of sex floating about in this particular effort. No doubt he dreams about ‘saving my life’. I wish I could save his.
So far so calm; but not the following poem:
Reward
Months and weeks and days go past.
And my soldiers fall at last.
Months and weeks and days
Their ways must be my ways.
And evermore
Love guards the door.From their eyes the gift I gain
Of grace that can subdue my pain.
From their eyes I hoard
My reward:
O brothers in my striving, it were best
That I should share your rest.
Habarcq, June 5[1]
Vera Brittain, too, has been of changeable mood lately. But she–in her way as devoted to some conception of “the cause” as Sassoon is pointedly not (but devoted, all the more so, to his men)–has much more freedom to choose her path. She is no longer a V.A.D. nurse, so, yesterday, she had speculated about becoming one of the army service officers–a W.A.A.C.
London, 5 June 1918
Wash out yesterday’s letter; have been enquiring about W.A.A.C. officers & find they are not needed at all; there isn’t even one vacancy in the whole Corps. I am really very glad, for whatever else I tried to be I know I should always be a nurse at heart, anyhow for the ‘duration of the War’. And I know I am a good one; as for my career it is literature really; nothing else matters. As for nursing I love it now, & my uniform as well (espec. the indoor version), having, as Mrs Leighton says, ‘earned the right to love them by suffering in them’. Rather a nice way of putting it, n’est ce pas? Somehow no female figure in the whole of this War has such a glamour as a hospital nurse, or such dignity. No one else so much ‘looks down into the depths’, which is a privilege, as it means a corresponding ability to look up into the heights.
This, though osmotically imbued with Leightonesque melodrama, is a very good way of framing it. I’ve been saying similar things, over and over, for a few years now–the draw (for them, for us) of a nasty, miserable, horrifying war, is the assumption (sometimes borne out; sometimes, bitterly, not) that with the depths of human cruelty, violence, and pointless misery comes a unique chance of seeing the best of our species–selflessness, love, compassion. And Vera Brittain, sheltered provincial young lady that she was in 1914, has embraced this aspect of the war with great fervor. Yes, there is a certain glamor in nursing, and she is a romantic young woman; but the commitment to share, as best she can, in the suffering of the soldiers is commendable.
She, naturally, puts it better:
One somehow felt that if there were something else for which one was needed & to which one’s abilities were better suited one ought to try & do it, but I am glad there isn’t. After all, I repeat, I’m a good nurse, & even if there is less authority attached to it I would rather look after a ward of wounded Tommies than an Army of domestic servants. I should never love any motto so well as ‘Inter Arma Caritas’.[2]